The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  She cried out as his elbow slammed down on her wrist, driving down on her again and again until she felt something snap inside her hand. She watched in mute horror as the gun tumbled out of her fingers over the side of the staircase. She lost sight of it as the bright, glowing dots disappearing into the darkness.

  The man pulled at her, trying to drag her out of the doorway, using his awful strength to pull her aside to get to Nubs. “Aunt Carrie!” Nubs screamed, her words ringing throughout the darkness, filling Carrie with renewed strength. She battled the man, beating him with her fists and claws, and in the frenzy she felt the thick metal object in her pocket swinging against her leg.

  She fumbled to get her fingers down inside the pocket and pulled, hearing the metallic click of the karambit’s blade locking into place. She swung and the man howled in pain, giving Carrie the leverage she needed to break free.

  She dove back inside the room and slammed the door shut, panting with the knife trembling in her hand. The sound of soft electronic beeping on the other side of the door was quiet. Carrie stepped backward, trying to catch her breath as the door’s loud magnetic lock activated.

  The little girl flung her arms around her, pressing her face against Carrie’s leg, crying into it.

  “You should not have come here,” a man’s voice said through the door.

  The knife danced in Carrie’s jittering hands, no matter how hard she gripped it. She clenched her teeth and forced herself to think past the child’s weeping, the dark room, and the man on the other side of the door. This was his lair, and she’d invaded it. The more time he had to plan, or to equip himself, the worse it would be.

  “Well, I did,” she said. Her voice was shaking, and she knew it, hated it, but continued on. “You don’t like it when someone interferes with your plans, do you? It makes you crazy, right? That man at the nightclub. You had a plan with him, and something went wrong. What did he do to make you so mad?”

  “Shut up about things you know nothing about!”

  It was working, Carrie thought. “Well, now it’s happening again. You had a plan for this girl, didn’t you? You were going to be her friend, right? Get her to trust you and believe you wouldn’t hurt her, just like Old Man Krissing, right? Because you’re a phony, aren’t you. A faker! A nothing! Well, I’m here now, and I’m not leaving.” Her fingers tightened around the knife. “Open the door, unless you’re afraid.”

  She watched the door, waiting for the first sign of movement, ready to slash and cut anything that tried to come through it. “Come on, pretender! Open the door!”

  The door did not move. “I can see you, you know.”

  Carrie turned to look around the room, searching for cameras. Of course he had cameras. He wanted to record what he did and save it for later. He wanted to watch his victims suffer as they waited for him to return. “Good,” she said, raising her middle finger in the air. “Why don’t you open the door and see me up close.”

  “You have a knife,” he said. His voice flat and hollow. “Do you think that will protect you or the child? You’re a fool. Now you will both pay dearly for your interference.”

  She could hear him going down the steps, leaving them trapped in the dark room. She bent down to Nubs and wrapped her arm around her again, kissing her on the head and holding her tightly. The room had no windows, and she realized she could not hear anything outside of the house. No wind. No crickets. Even the sound of the man walking downstairs had vanished.

  It’s soundproofed, she thought. It has to be. He wouldn’t want the mailman hearing someone scream for help.

  There was nothing left to do but wait for him to open the door, and then, she thought, she would fight until she was dead. But even if it was with her last breath, she would claw out his eyes or cut through his throat just enough for Nubs to get away. Just enough for that, even if it was not enough for anything else.

  28

  REIN POINTED AT THE CAR PARKED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD ahead of them. “There she is.”

  Waylon leaned forward, squinting. “Why the hell did she park there?”

  “She must have wanted to walk up to the house on foot.”

  “Goddamn it,” Waylon said. “I told her to sit tight and wait for us.”

  “Well, maybe she got tired of waiting.”

  “It’s not my fault the cell phone lost its signal.”

  “Yet she still managed to find the place,” Rein said.

  Waylon stopped the car and cut it off, hurrying out of the driver’s seat and running up to Carrie’s car. He ducked down to see if she was inside it, saw that she wasn’t, and smacked his thigh. “Son of a bitch. I told her to wait.”

  Rein eyed the front of the house. “Door’s open.”

  Both of them stared at the darkened windows. “You think she’s dumb enough to have gone in there alone?” Waylon said.

  “Is there any doubt in your mind?”

  “Not one.” Waylon drew his pistol. “Let’s go get our girl, then.”

  They moved toward the house, and Rein crouched beside him, empty-handed. “I wish I had something for you,” Waylon said.

  “You were always the better shot.”

  The two of them flanked the door on opposite sides, Rein hanging back as Waylon inched forward with his gun, cutting the angles through the door’s small opening. “I can’t see shit,” Waylon hissed in frustration.

  “Wait,” Rein insisted, pulling Waylon back onto the porch as he leaned forward and pushed it open the rest of the way. He stood facing the dark living room and closed his eyes, slowly inhaling, holding his breath as he tilted his head forward, listening. The crickets in the fields all around them. Waylon’s labored breathing. The buzzing of a fluorescent light beneath them, and then the sound of a metal-edged tool or weapon being picked up and laid back down on a wooden workbench. “The basement,” Rein said. “Someone is down there.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Sleeping in a jail cell surrounded by people who want to kill you,” Rein said. “You learn how to listen.”

  Waylon raised his gun and entered the house first, both of them crouched low as they advanced across the floor. Rein tapped Waylon on the shoulder, pointing him in the direction of the basement door.

  They could barely make out the door’s white frame. Someone had left the door wide open, but the lights were off below. Both of them stood, staring down the flight of narrow steps that descended into nothingness. Rein reached above the door frame and the walls around it, feeling for a light switch, then shook his head. They could hear one another breathing heavily, panting as they began down the stairs, both of their chests skipping and jumping, but still they moved forward, traveling down one step at a time. Waylon scanned the room with his weapon blindly, the bright glowing dots of his gunsights glaring in the darkness.

  Rein grabbed Waylon firmly by the shoulder, stopping him.

  They were perched on the steps, suspended over the concrete floor, and Waylon looked back at him in confusion. Before Rein could answer, something rolled toward them, a round metal cylinder that rattled and clanked, stamped Flashbang – 1.5 Second Delay. Rein only had enough time to cover his face before he realized what it was. The sudden explosion of light and sound knocked both of them sideways. Rein’s hands grasped frantically at the nothingness, but all he found was Waylon, and even as he tried grabbing on to him, both of them were already falling.

  Waylon landed flat on his chest, the air knocked out of him. He gasped like a dying mule, straining to get air back into his lungs. Rein struck the floor with his jaw so hard he felt his teeth loosen. He lifted his head, staring in shock at the bright light. He saw the empty flashbang canister on the basement floor near the steps and wiped his nose. Blood was leaking out of it like a faucet. Someone was coming toward them.

  Rein groaned as he tried to get up, barely able to make out the man standing over him. Instead, he saw a bright white butcher’s apron and the cruel, comical frown of the Greek face
of tragedy. Underneath the mask Rein could make out the same shape of the mouth and eyes he’d seen in the photograph of Travis Berry.

  Travis bent down and grabbed a handful of Rein’s hair, gripping it tight and pulling back as he slammed his fist into Rein’s face, once, twice, the impact crushing his nose and splaying his lips. Rein’s head slumped down. He was barely conscious as he was dragged across the floor, feeling its cool concrete against his skin. He heard, rather than felt, the metal shackle snap tight around his left wrist, and it stirred him, but it was too late. When he pulled his arm forward to grab for the apron, he realized he was bound to the wall by a thick metal chain.

  Waylon’s choked breathing filled the room as Travis picked up Waylon’s gun, turned it around in his hands to inspect it, then tucked it down inside his apron pocket. He walked past Waylon toward a workbench filled with ugly-looking tools and devices. Long metal needles and iron pokers, thick shears and jagged handsaws. He selected a long machete and flicked his thumb against the blade’s edge, testing its sharpness. He looked back at Rein, his tragedy mask tilted sideways as he stared at Rein’s face.

  Rein steeled himself as the man came toward him, machete in hand, and then bent down, looking at Rein from behind the large cutouts in his mask. “I know you,” he said.

  “I know you too, Travis,” Rein shot back. “Let me go and we’ll get to know each other a lot better.”

  “I thought I would have to come visit you, but instead you’ve come to me. You see, I’ve been studying you for a long time, Jacob Rein.”

  Rein lunged forward against the chain but fell short and backed up to the basement wall, saving his strength, knowing he would need it. The masked man turned and looked at Waylon, still lying facedown on the floor. “Leave him alone,” Rein shouted, rattling his chain as loud as he could. “Bill! Bill! Get up!”

  “The little girl has beautiful eyes. I will bring them to you as a present first. And then I will bring her something of yours.” He looked down at Waylon. “I don’t think we need to worry about him any longer.”

  “Bill!” Rein screamed, watching in horror as Travis bent down and grabbed a handful of Waylon’s hair, raising his bloody face off the basement floor. Travis placed the machete’s blade beneath Waylon’s jaw. Rein’s voice died in his throat as the long knife’s edge slit Waylon across the neck. Waylon’s feet kicked and he pounded his fists on the floor until the blade reached the underside of his other ear and he collapsed facedown, not moving.

  “I will be back for you,” Travis said, pointing at him with the dripping machete. He stepped over Waylon and started up the basement stairs.

  Rein could not look away from his friend’s motionless body, unable to control the burst of grief welling inside of him. He lowered his head and sobbed, letting it out, letting it consume him. As he wept, he heard something stir in the basement and opened his eyes, seeing Bill Waylon’s right hand extending out.

  Waylon gurgled and sputtered blood as he raised his head. The open wound under his neck pulsated rivers of crimson, but he extended his left hand. His legs moved, and he was crawling across the floor.

  “Bill?” Rein whispered.

  Waylon’s words were a clotted tangle of grunts as he forced himself forward, large bubbles of blood popping from his severed throat, but still he crawled. He flailed with his hands, grabbing for the workbench until finding a narrow bracket between its legs.

  Rein watched in amazement as Waylon lifted himself upward, gurgling as he reached for the bench’s ledge with both hands, rocking it back and forth until it began to sway. Rein stretched toward him as far as he could, pulling on the chain with all of his might, calling out, “Come on, come on!”

  The workbench tilted like a large oak tree being hacked by an ax. He rocked it, trying to tip it. Dozens of metal objects fell from the bench, clanging on the cement floor, until the entire structure came loose and crashed down on top of Waylon.

  In the dust and darkness, Rein could not see his friend anymore, or hear him, but the effort had been enough. Thick metal spikes and knives lay scattered on the floor all around Rein. He sorted through them, tossing aside what he didn’t need, until there, shining in the shadows, was the large rectangular blade of a meat cleaver. He was ready for when the bastard came back.

  As Rein reached for it, he stopped, hearing creaking stairs above him. The man’s heavy footsteps as he went to find Carrie and Nubs. The horrors they would have to endure while Rein stayed trapped in the basement, clutching his weapon uselessly. There would be no great battle. When the man realized Rein was armed, he’d simply shut the door and wait. It would only take a few days of dehydration to make Rein too weak to defend himself. He would force Rein to listen to what he was doing to the girls. Rein knew that. He would send pieces of them down into the basement like scraps in a processing plant.

  The footsteps were getting more faint then. Travis was going upward, farther away. That’s where they must be, Rein realized, forming a map of the house’s interior in his mind. Find the room on the second floor.

  He gripped the meat cleaver’s handle and looked at his left arm, seeing where the shackle was bolted to him. He squeezed his hand into a fist and pressed his arm flat against the basement wall, trying to get his hand high up from the cuff.

  Emily Cross, he thought. The little girl whose life he’d taken and could never give back.

  Natalie Michaels. Nubs. The little girl he’d been tasked to find, and come so far, only to have her torn from him at the very last.

  He shifted his hand upward from the shackle as far as it would go, giving himself half an inch of wrist before the bottom of his palm. He lined up the cleaver’s blade against his skin and took a deep breath, telling himself the fight was not finished yet. A roar erupted deep from within his chest as he raised the cleaver high in the air and swung.

  * * *

  The steps creaked outside of the upstairs room. Nubs clenched Carrie ever tighter, her entire being wracked with tremors. “You stay behind me, baby,” Carrie said. Rein’s knife was sticky in her hands, tacked to her skin with dried blood.

  That won’t be the last of you on this blade, you son of a bitch, she thought. I will put it inside of you and let it drink.

  The keys on the electronic pad outside of the door beeped one at a time until the locks holding it shut disengaged with a click. As the doorknob turned, Carrie reached down and touched the top of Nubs’s head, caressing her. “I need you to be brave one last time, baby. Can you do that for Aunt Carrie?”

  The child’s arms were clamped around her, refusing to let go. The door was opening. Carrie could hear her own voice trembling and forced herself to say, “When I say, you have to run down the stairs and get out. You keep running, no matter what.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You have to, baby.”

  “He’s going to hurt you!”

  Yes, he will. But he won’t get you, Carrie thought.

  The door opened fully. The man standing there was outlined by the dim light of the house beneath him. Carrie’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she could see his butcher’s apron, slick with fresh blood, and his grotesque mask, the eyes and mouth darkened by shadow.

  “Remember what I said, baby,” Carrie told her.

  Travis raised his machete and leveled it at Carrie. Its size dwarfed the small blade in her hands. “Rein should not have brought you to this place. He has led you to your destruction.”

  Carrie clutched Nubs to the side of her leg, keeping her hand pressed down over the girl’s ear, hoping she couldn’t hear the man speak.

  “Give her to me. I will show you mercy.”

  The knife was shaking in Carrie’s hand.

  “If you do not, I will skin her alive as you watch.” The machete turned sideways, aimed between her eyes. “Give me the child.”

  Carrie stroked Nubs’s hair one final time as she raised her own knife. “You come and take her,” she roared. “Molon labe, motherfucker!”
r />   He leaped forward with the machete raised, his long apron sweeping against his legs as he moved. Carrie crouched low, ready to spring forward with the knife, to strike as hard and fast as she could, as many times as she could, to scream while she was able for Nubs to run, and run, and keep running, when she saw something metal flash through the air behind the man. It circled wide over his shoulder and landed with a deep thump inside the right side of his mask, the sound of an ax sinking deep into the stump of a tree.

  His legs wobbled beneath his apron at the impact, the length of the meat cleaver’s blade stuck out far enough in front of his face for him to see it. He reached up, feeling the cleaver’s spine and handle, feeling where it had severed his ear in half, feeling where it had bitten into his right eye.

  Carrie stared in amazement as Travis took two steps forward and collapsed, his body flopping like he was being jolted with electricity, slapping the floor with his feet, hands, and head. A half-naked, bloodied figure stood in the doorway, clutching the severed stump of his left wrist. Jacob Rein looked first at Carrie and then at the little girl hiding behind her. “Is that her?” he asked.

  Carrie reached down for Nubs, peeling the tiny arms from around her leg and saying, “It’s all right. The bad man is gone. He can’t hurt anyone now.”

  The child looked at Rein in confusion, horrified by his severed hand and all the blood, but all he saw was her long blond hair and soft angelic features. How, even in her horror, she was very much alive. Very, very much alive.

  He stayed in the shadow of the door, not wanting to frighten her. “I guess you must be Nubs.”

  He heard her reply as he closed his eyes. It was a soft, angelic voice. His legs gave out beneath him.

  Rein fell backward through the door, tumbling down over the top stair and rolling. Descending through the darkness. The void opened its maw wide, waiting to swallow him. Its long, slimy tentacles slithered toward him, cinching around his ankles and wrist and neck, and he surrendered to it. It was time, he thought. He was too tired to fight it any longer.